Month: February 2016

This magazine’s first birthday party was hosted by the Roaring Fork Co-Op and co-sponsored by Bravo Catering. It featured a tasting from Marble Distilling Company, wine and beer from Sopris Liquor and candy from Grand Avenue Sweets. A silent auction raised $1,870 for Colorado Animal Rescue (CARE).

Students in the Rams Energy Club, led by Fiona Laird, Emily Mata and Tavia Teitler, dedicated the new 385-kilowatt solar array at Roaring Fork High School (RFHS) in late January. The 1,242 solar panels will provide for all of the high school’s annual electric needs and will also feed extra electricity into Xcel Energy’s grid. Over the course of a year, the array is expected to produce nearly 613,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity. That’s comparable to the electricity used in a year by 85 homes.

It’s mid-February as I write this, and I’m counting the days until warmer temperatures arrive. But back in October, I was one of the people who were looking forward to that first big snow. Anticipation even from me, a non-skier!
Yes, I’m one of the few who don’t tune skis and check bindings three times in anticipation of the first big dump. I have tried skiing a half a dozen times—and visited the hospital twice. First I came out with crunches; the next time, I came out with an arm sling for a separated shoulder. Coming down the slope, my state of mind was comparable to that a semi-truck driver looking for the runaway ramp.

For me, that healthy state is called Colorado. I grew up here, then lived in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. I’m celebrating a five-year anniversary since returning home to the Mile High State on “March forth!” 2011—a memorable date.
Coming home cured most of what ailed me.

“Hello little buddy,” a Calaway-Young Cancer Center patient said as six-year-old Chauncey strode into her room. “I am so happy you came to visit me. What kind of dog are you?”
“He’s a cockachon,” replied Jacquie Tannenbaum, Chauncey’s owner and handler. “Part cocker spaniel, part bichon. That’s what his DNA test told me, but there’s probably something else in there too. Who knows?”

If you have driven around Glenwood Springs or Carbondale, you’ve seen Joe Burleigh’s work. His stringed and musical sculpture Logarhythm sits along Carbondale’s Main Street and his Iron Crystal Cubic—a loose interpretation of the crystal matrix of iron atoms at room temperature—was installed in the summer 2014 in a roundabout in west Glenwood Springs.
Joe Burleigh’s palette is steel and his paintbrush is a fiery gas forge. In addition to outdoor sculptures displayed in Grand Junction, Colorado; Sheridan, Wyoming; Chevy Chase Maryland; and Morristown, New Jersey, Burleigh creates handcrafted metal works that range from custom furniture to architectural elements. Roaring Fork Lifestyle recently encouraged Burleigh, who speaks softly but carries a big hammer, to talk about his work.

YouthEntity recently hosted the Western Slope ProStart Competition Boot Camp, led by the Colorado Restaurant Association Education Foundation. Competitors and mentors prepared for upcoming competitions that offer awards and $800,000 in scholarships. In 2015, YouthEntity’s team won the Cysco Cup in Denver. More information at YouthEntity.org. Photos by Paul Hilts.

You need to be physically active to get and stay healthy. Everyone knows that, but getting started can be quite daunting.
Many overworked, stressed-out Americans start a fitness program, do all right for a short time and then drop out. (According to multiple studies in the U.S., Britain and New Zealand, the dropout rate is one third to one half, and about 80 percent of the dropouts occur between January and February.) The reasons? People see no results. Or they sustain an injury.

On a road trip last autumn, I watched my friend Steven move through his bodywork each morning. Used to pushing my own to its physical limits, I was surprised to see this muscular man so gentle in his body. Despite his movement, a stillness filled the hotel room. After meditation one morning, he must have noted my fascination. “Do you want to play?” he invited.
We stood relaxed, feet shoulder-width apart, taking deep belly breaths to settle into the body. We then rubbed our hands together briskly, like when you’re freezing, to warm them up.
“Now drop your hands to your sides and relax.”

Experts believe that sleep deprivation played a role in the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear meltdowns and the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447, which killed all 228 people aboard.
But accident-related health impacts of sleepless can also be found much closer to home. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 100,000 police-reported crashes directly result from driver fatigue each year.

I could have never predicted how much interest my August Roaring Fork Lifestyle article on the book How to Raise on Adult would generate. For weeks following the magazine article’s release, friends and even strangers would engage me around town or email me to say that they, too, had found the book’s ideas fascinating.
The Basalt library invited me to serve on a panel with local therapist Kathy Hegburg and Peter Mueller, principal of Basalt High School. The Carbondale Community School invited me to lead a parent discussion on the book. This spring, Ross Montessori plans to have me lead yet another discussion on a parent education. Clearly, I was not the only one for whom the ideas in the book resonated.

During the winter holidays, I spent five days alone in an octagonal stone hermitage at St. Benedict’s, a Trappist monastery that sits on nearly 4,000 acres in a snowy bowl surrounded by high ridges above Old Snowmass. It’s the home of Father Thomas Keating, and the monastery maintains a few small hermitages, offered by donation, in the Benedictine spirit of hospitality.
Although I’ve spent a lot of time in silent retreat, in these last few years of preparing to enter Unitarian Universalist ministry, I have been too committed to take time away. And yet, ironically, as a minister, I find that times of idleness and quietness have become even more essential. As I drove the snowy roads to the monastery on Christmas Eve, I wondered, “Will I remember how to just be? Will I be frantically trying to study something, just out of habit? Will I feel guilty that I am not answering emails?”

More than a few of Janelle Forbes’ clients have broken into tears or laughter on the massage table.
Forbes owns Cardiff Therapy in Glenwood Springs and the business has been open for eight years. But recently, she has learned some techniques that open a new bag of tricks and new possibilities for her clients.

Roaring Fork Lifestyle’s editor, Nicolette Toussaint, who admits that she’s a serial gym dropout, asked this reporter to find half a dozen indoor workouts she “might actually enjoy and stick to.”
It’s not that Toussaint is sedentary. She teaches figure skating, skis black diamond runs and was spotted doing a duet with a belly dancer at this magazine’s birthday party! Figuring that she likes to dance, this reporter found six local dance workouts that add up to the most fun you can have with your clothes (mostly) on.